Discourse

"Se non volea pulir sua scusa tanto, Che la facesse di menzogna rea."

"And none speaks false, when there is none to hear."

"There is no liar like the one who lies to himself. He has a fool indeed for an audience."

"You lie—under a mistake— For this is the most civil sort of lie That can be given to a man's face, I now Say what I think."

"Now all the truth is out, Be secret and take defeat From any brazen throat, For how can you compete, Being honor bred, with one Who, were it proved he lies, Were neither shamed in his own Nor in his neighbors’ eyes?"

"As ten millions of circles can never make a square, so the united voice of myriads cannot lend the smallest foundation to falsehood."

"I mean you lie—under a mistake."

"If you want truth to go round the world you must hire an express train to pull it. But if you want a lie to go round the world, it will fly; it is light as a feather and a breath will carry it."

"But he that sows lies in the end shall not lack of a harvest, and soon he may rest from toil indeed, while others reap and sow in his stead."

"When liars enter by the city gate, in front of them there is a finger pointing at them, behind them there is a finger pointing at them."

"An occasional little white lie such as Weston's probably won't cause any lasting damage. And at times, telling the truth—particularly the whole truth to a child who's not at an age to handle it—may do more harm than good, they say."

"Tell a lie and then tell the truth: it will be considered a lie."

"The glory which is built upon a lie soon becomes a most unpleasant incumbrance. … How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!"

"As long as you live you should not increase evil by telling lies; for if you do, to succumb will be your lot."

"Stop! I am not a real Sharkslayer! I lied."

"Everybody lies."

"It is better to be poor and walk in integrity than to be stupid and speak lies."

"An evil soul producing holy witness Is like a villain with a smiling cheek; A goodly apple rotten at the heart: O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!"

"“I don’t think he (Branch Rickey) would lie,” said Red Smith, “but he was so good at evasion, at circumlocution, that he didn’t have to lie.”"

"Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to the vice of lying!"

"Whose tongue soe'er speaks false, Not truly speaks; who speaks not truly, lies."

"A lie never lives to be old."

"Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth."

"'Tis as easy as lying."

"These lies are like the father that begets them; gross as a mountain, open, palpable."

"To lapse in fulness Is sorer than to lie for need, and falsehood Is worse in kings than beggars."

"The Book of Daniel is especially fitted to be a battle-ground between faith and unbelief. It admits of no half-way measures. It is either Divine or an imposture. To write any book under the name of another, and to give it out to be his, is, in any case, a forgery, dishonest in itself, and destructive of all trustworthiness. But the case as to the Book of Daniel, if it were not his, would go far beyond even this. The writer, were he not Daniel, must have lied on a most frightful scale."

"The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie."

"Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying! I grant you I was down and out of breath; and so was he: but we rose both at an instant and fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock."

"That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies; That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright— But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight."

"He will lie, sir, with such volubility, that you would think truth were a fool."

"There's a lot of lying in modern finance. ... I don't like lying."

"If there is a punishment for telling the truth, then many people will tell lies. If telling lies is incentivized, then many people will tell lies. And if you allow mobs of people online or off to intimidate people and don’t stand up to them, then many people will be intimidated. And they will change what they say accordingly."

"For my part, if a lie may do thee grace, I'll gild it with the happiest terms I have."

"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil."

"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour."

"What’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s — it was like — we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment. — Texas A&M University (April 15, 2019)"

"When hope lies dead—ah, when 'tis death to live, And wrongs remembered make the heart still bleed, Better are Sleep's kind lies for Life's blind need Than truth, if lies a little peace can give."

"By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man. A man who himself does not believe what he tells another […] has even less worth than if he were a mere thing […] makes himself a mere deceptive appearance of man, not man himself."

"His supposed mythomania [of Diego Rivera] is in direct relation to his tremendous imagination. That is to say, he is as much of a liar as the poets or as the children who have not yet been turned into idiots by school or mothers. I have heard him tell all kinds of lies: from the most innocent, to the most complicated stories about people whom his imagination combined in a fantastic situation or actions, always with a great sense of humor and a marvelous critical sense; but I have never heard him say a single stupid or banal lie. Lying, or playing at lying, he unmasks many people, he learns the interior mechanism of others, who are much more ingenuously liars than he, and the most curious thing about the supposed lies of Diego, is that in the long and short of it, those who are involved in the imaginary combination become angry, not because of the lie, but because of the truth contained in the lie, that always comes to the surface."

"Drummond: All shine, and no substance! Bert, whenever you see something bright, shining, perfect-seeming—all gold, with purple spots—look behind the paint! And if it’s a lie—show it up for what it really is!"

"One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible, and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so."

"Trump undermines the free press because he wants to be the only legitimate source of information in society. He lies all the time to break down the processes by which we discern the truth about the world around us, and compile the observations and facts which make up the tapestry of reality. He has exposed the paper-thin vulnerability of our democratic society, which depends mightily on observing social norms—like yielding to shame—and a shared acceptance of some common set of truths.The American president is determined to bulldoze this architecture of social structures, and usher in an era where force, not deliberation and cooperation, determines the path our society will take. If he never acknowledges any truth besides his own, he never has to do anything outside his own direct interests. He does not have to actually respond to any kind of criticism, or ever reconsider his course of action. Relentless lying, after all, is a form of coercion, in which you bend others to your will by forcing them to accept the infrastructure of your false reality—or to give up caring whether anything is true or false in the first place. Don't believe your eyes and ears. Everybody was cheering for me."

"You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies."

"A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old."

"Education has paralleled the life of prospering white America: it has been characterized by reverence for efficiency, cultivation of competence unattended by concern for aim, big white lies, and the mainly successful blackout of Black life."

"We discovered there were some Eastern Europeans who could defeat the polygraph at any time. Americans are not very good at it, because we are raised to tell the truth and when we lie it is easy to tell we are lying. But we find a lot of Europeans and Asiatics can handle that polygraph without a blip, and you know they are lying and you have evidence that they are lying."

"Half the world knows not how the other half lies."

"Show me a liar, and I will show thee a thief."

"I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth."